Aid crews home from Haiti

Scale of disaster shocks volunteers

Dave Martinez II, part of the Rescue Task Force volunteer team sent to Haiti after the Jan. 12 earthquake, was greeted by his wife, Laura, and 3-month-old daughter, Marissa, yesterday. At left is team member Chris Simmons.
— Peggy Peattie

Dave Martinez II, part of the Rescue Task Force volunteer team sent to Haiti after the Jan. 12 earthquake, was greeted by his wife, Laura, and 3-month-old daughter, Marissa, yesterday. At left is team member Chris Simmons.
— Peggy Peattie

Weary and stunned by the devastation they saw, six members of a Carlsbad-based relief organization returned home yesterday after spending two weeks helping victims of the Haiti earthquake.

Volunteers from Rescue Task Force, which responds to disasters around the world, arrived at Lindbergh Field’s commuter terminal and were greeted by family members and the media. They left for Haiti less than a week after the Jan. 12 earthquake, which is believed to have killed more than 150,000 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless.

The trip was a homecoming for one member of the group: Stanley Vincent, 29, a California Highway Patrol officer who lives in Los Angeles, was born in Haiti and lived there until 1999. His mother and sister, who still live in Haiti, were not injured in the quake, and their houses were not damaged.

Vincent said it was difficult for him to leave Haiti after seeing buildings reduced to ruins and the suffering of quake victims begging for food and water.

“I feel like I’m leaving half of my heart down there,” he said.

Gary Becks, who heads Rescue Task Force, said there are no plans for another round of volunteers to go to Haiti, but the group is putting together cargo containers of medical supplies to send to the Caribbean island.

Three emergency-room physicians from the University of California San Diego Medical Center, along with a La Jolla physician, also returned home late Sunday after spending two weeks in Haiti volunteering with International Relief Teams, another San Diego-based disaster-relief organization.

Colleen Buono, Sean-Xavier Neath and Chris Sloane of UCSD, and Nathan Watson, a La Jolla resident who is assistant director of the emergency room at Pioneers Memorial Hospital in Brawley, treated hundreds of patients a day. Watson said the doctors saw most of their patients under tarps or in tents because Haitians wouldn’t go into the hospital, fearing another aftershock.

Watson said he has participated in relief work in Africa and Latin America and traveled to Sumatra after the December 2004 tsunami that killed about 150,000 people in Southeast Asia. None of those disasters compares to Haiti, Watson said.

“This is by far the worst in terms of the sheer amount of human suffering we came onto the day we got there,” he said.

The Rescue Task Force group that returned yesterday also included five San Diego Gas & Electric Co. workers, who hooked up electricity to a mobile medical unit and a tent camp where more than 70,000 slept. Chris Morrow, a San Diego freelance journalist who supplied footage to CNN, joined the six others last week after delivering 1,200 pounds of antibiotics to quake victims.